Not decline

Yesterday I headed up a post 'Decline'. Today Skye Jethani, on the Out of Ur blog, writes about the Southern Baptists in the States suffering ongoing decline.

He notes how he asked Willard Dallas about the situation some time ago, and was surprised by his answer:

“I am not discouraged,” he replied, “because I believe that Christ is in charge of his church, with all of its warts, and moles, and hairs. He knows what he is doing and he is marching on.”

Jethani goes on to note: ...the truth is some churches are dying [and perhaps even some denominations] and others reached room temperature years ago. But that doesn’t mean the Church is dying.

He goes on to say that his experience at the Lausanne Conference confirms this. The evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, show the global church is more than surviving...it’s thriving! Some of the growth may be attributed to strategic planning on the part of Western churches and missions agencies in the early 20th century. But what we heard again and again were the unexpected and even miraculous ways in which the church has been planted, germinated, fed, and nurtured.

Decline

The church in the UK is not in decline because people no longer believe in God, rather people in the UK no longer believe in God because the church is in decline.

Kim Fabricius writing another bunch of doodlings on the Faith and Theology blog.

(Incidentally, when I worked for the Presbyterians there were several words that got used a good deal and which I began to baulk at being used so readily: paradigm, contextual...and most especially, decline. It's an excuse word, as I think Fabricius may be indicating.)

Just in case you thought you were alone....

There's an endless amount of handwringing going on in the mainline denominations (not just the Presbyterians) about decreasing this and declining that and vanishing those and where the heck are the people who used to be here...

You're not alone. Terry Mattingly has just written about the way in which denominations in the States are facing these issues, but adds an interesting slant to the problem: liberal and conservative Jews are facing exactly the same issues. As he notes:

Conservative Judaism’s membership rolls are in free fall.

According to a strategic plan for renewal issued in February by the denomination’s congregational arm, the number of families served by synagogues belonging to what was once American Judaism’s leading stream has shrunk by 14% since 2001. In the denomination’s Northeast region, the number of families has dropped by 30%.

And liberal Jews are in the same boat...

Mattingly nicely sums up the issues amongst both Christians and Jews as: the post-denominational mess.

Church in Decline? Think again!

One key exception, is Samuel P Huntington's book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, one of the most widely read analyses of current global trends, which does pay serious attention to changing religious patterns. Even Huntington, though, understates the rising force of Christianity. He believes that the relative Christian share of global population will fall steeply in the new century, and that this religion will be supplanted by Islam: "In the long run...Muhammad wins out."
But far from Islam being the world's largest religion by 2020 or so, as Huntington suggests, Christianity will still have a massive lead, and will maintain its position into the foreseeable future. By 2050, there should still be about three Christians for every two Muslims worldwide. Some 34% of the world's people will then be Christian, roughly what the figure was at the height of European world hegemony in 1900.
Huntington's analysis of the evidnece is misguided in one crucial respect. While he rightly notes the phenomenal rates of population growth in Muslim countries, he ignores the fact that similar or even higher rates are also found in already populous Christian countries, above all in Africa. Alongside the Muslim efflorescence he rightly foresees, there will also be a Christian population explosion, often in the same or adjacent countries. If we look at the nations with the fastest popoulation growth and the youngest populations, they are evenly distributed between Christian and Muslim dominated societies.

From The Next Christendom; the coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins. age 5. Jenkins has written several books along similar lines, showing that Christianity is in anything but decline, even in Europe, where supposedly it's at death's door.